Unwind
by Michelle
Summary: It starts when Natasha wakes up and just goes downhill from there.


_This fic originated in a lovely Bruce/Darcy fic about the same topic, and a resultant conversation between Pamela and me about Clint and Natasha needing the same. Because reasons._

_Caveat lector: Clint and Natasha have sex while she's on her period in this fic. Don't say I didn't warn you._

* * *

It starts when she wakes up.

Her head feels fuzzy, like there's something knocking around inside and scrambling up all of her thoughts. In and of itself, that isn't anything she's particularly worried about; the team had gotten in late last night from Canada, and late nights with early mornings always give her a headache.

Her muscles protest when she rolls over, sore from the events of the past week, one which had begun with a by the book infiltration in Ottawa and had culminated in a shoot out in the Canadian wilderness. Alpha Flight had taken point, and despite initial awkwardness derived primarily from Stark's usual inability to take orders, she ended up genuinely liking the Canadian team, even if she hopes she never has to work with them again. She's already dreading trying to clean Sasquatch's stray fur out of her guns.

She rolls over and groans when the sunlight crosses her face, disturbing Clint from his typically light slumber.

"Hey," he croaks, not quite awake. "What time is it?"

She glances as the clock. "Too early. Go back to sleep," she says and kicks her legs over the edge of the bed, wincing as the movement causes her to notice the other things that are a little off about her body today.

The mild headache grows when she sits up, discovering that it's accompanied by stiffness in her back and shoulders. She's all too aware what the attendant dull ache in her belly means. She stands, heading for the bathroom.

Her suspicions are confirmed when she pulls down her pants, seeing the dark red staining her underwear. It had been a new pair, too, a pink lacy contraption that she'd been looking forward to watching Clint peel off her body with his teeth.

Fuck.

It was a cruel joke that the Red Room would take away her ability to have children, but not do anything about the rest of the process.

She reaches over to fumble around under the sink for a tampon before she remembers that she's in Clint's room; it had been closer when they returned last night, searching for the nearest bed in which to pass out.

"Fuck," she says aloud this time, relishing the way the harsh syllable feels on her tongue.

She walks carefully out of the bathroom, her stomach hurting more now that she's noticed, and she looks ruefully at Clint's sleep-rumbled form curled around her pillow. She wants nothing more than to climb back in bed with him, insinuate herself into his arms, and just let him hold her for the rest of the morning, but alas, nature calls.

She pulls his discarded t-shirt on over her head as she shuffles toward the door, covering the thin camisole she slept in, just in case she runs into anyone in the halls. She can smell Clint on the shirt, the strange mixture of gun oil, soap, and sweat that makes up his scent, and though it's a far second best to spending the morning half-awake with her face pressed into his neck, it'll have to do.

It's early enough yet that she doesn't meet anyone on the way to her room, for which she's grateful. It not that she doesn't like her teammates, but the last thing she's prepared to handle right now is Tony Stark and his never ending bird jokes.

As soon as the door slides shut behind her, she sags, allowing herself to relax a little bit. She hits the bathroom first to take care of her problem before slipping into her workout clothes and heading right back out. The cramping isn't too bad yet; there's only a faint haze of paint twisting inside of her, and sometimes, if she works out, she can halt its progress before it really gets going.

She finds Steve down in the gym, slamming his fists into a punching bag. She runs into Rogers down here often enough that he doesn't even break rhythm when she walks in, and from his sheen of sweat, she rather suspects that he's been here for the last couple hours at least. Despite the early hour, she isn't surprised or even worried to find him here - she and Clint have trouble sleeping, too.

She briefly entertains the notion of taking out some of her frustrations on one of the free-standing punching bags near Rogers, but decides against it. She needs to run right now, needs to use her muscles mindlessly for a while. She steps on one of the treadmills and loses herself to the cadence of her breathing, the beat of her feet on the smooth track.

An hour later, she's starting to realize that there isn't anything she can do to outrun these cramps, and she decides to give up the ghost and find a quiet space to curl up for the rest of the day.

Steve is still assaulting his demons when she leaves, aiming a tiny wave in his direction. She cleans up back in her room, washing away her workout in a matter of minutes, but staying under the blissfully hot spray of the shower for longer than she should, letting the heat sink into her muscles and work out some of the kinks that are starting to assert themselves. Unfortunately, just as it had been with the exercise, the heat isn't helping the more insistent ache inside of her.

She shuts off the water with a sigh, shuffling through the motions of getting dressed and making her way out to the kitchen from caffeine before she collapses. At least she can take care of the headache.

The common area is deserted, so instead of retreating back to her room, she parks herself on the overstuffed couch, bringing her knees up to her chest in a mostly futile effort to get comfortable. She sips her tea slowly while she scrolls through Tony's Netflix queue, eventually settling on some crappy action movie set in Moscow. The accents are universally terrible, and Bulgaria is obviously doubling for Russia, but it's simple entertainment, mindless enough that she can let her brain disengage without missing anything important.

Halfway through a thoroughly unrealistic firefight, she starts to drift off, so she drops down to her side, and it's so nice that she actually found a comfortable position that she doesn't even mind when Bruce joins her.

He doesn't try to talk, just sits in one of the recliners off to the side, idly watching the screen in between taps on his tablet, and snorting at all the appropriate moments. He disappears during one of her brief naps, exiting her afternoon just as silently as he entered it.

She's debating the merits of staying comfortable or getting up for food when Clint pads into the room.

"Hey," he says, sitting down carefully beside her head. "I missed you this morning." There's a question in his tone and on his face, but to his credit, he lets her choose whether or not to acknowledge it.

She sits up, shifts closer to him on the couch and rests her hand on his thigh. After another moment of thought during which she makes the decision that she really doesn't give a shit what anyone thinks about her relationship with Clint, she lays her head on his shoulder. It's a rare thing for them to be openly affectionate, both preferring to save that for time behind closed doors, but the pain in her belly is rapidly graduating from dull to piercing, and she kind of wants a hug.

"Sorry," she murmurs, and fuck, she can't believe that she actually feels like crying right now. She's the Black Widow, dammit. She doesn't cry when she kills people, she doesn't cry when she gets shot, and she sure as hell doesn't cry just because her best friend sat down next to her and let her lean against him.

But try telling that to the tear threatening at the corner of her eye.

She hears him cuss under his breath when he notices her mood, and he shifts, throwing one arm around her shoulders and using his opposite hand to tip her face up. "What's going on, sweetheart? What can I do?"

She swipes at her eyes, forcing herself not to crumple in front of him, especially not here, in the middle of the room where anyone could walk in. She closes her eyes for a moment to gather herself, imagines punching her hormones in the face.

When she opens her eyes, she finds him staring at her, brow furrowed, and her heart clenches a little at the sight. She glances around the room nervously, looking for signs of the others. She thinks they're alone, but she really doesn't want the rest of the team knowing why she's so cranky. Even if Thor and Bruce wouldn't care, and Steve would be too embarrassed to comment, she just knows Tony would start marking her cycle on one of his secret little calendars, and dammit, she likes to at least pretend that she's above bodily weakness.

She whispers low, under her breath. "It's nothing, just cramps."

Clint looks confused for a long second, but then comprehension dawns, and he smiles understandingly at her and presses his lips to her forehead.

"Did you already run?" he asks, and she supposes this is one of those times she should feel weird that he knows her so well, but they've been lovers for years and partners for longer than that, and sometimes she's not sure if she has any secrets left from him.

"Yeah, but it didn't help," she says, then leans into his neck.

He makes a sympathetic noise, then asks, "Pancakes?" Her stomach rumbles in response, and they both laugh a little. He squeezes her knee. "Come on. I'll even put chocolate chips in the batter."

The smell of cooking food brings the rest of the team out of the woodwork one by one, though it looks like only Tony had been still in bed. Clint whips up more batter and turns pancakes onto plates with good humor, eating his own in between batches. By the time she's grousing with Bruce about sore muscles and Canadian giants with too much fur, she's starting to feel less cranky, a little more stable, and the foul mood she felt brewing early this morning has started to fade.

Maybe it's the wash of hormones in her system, but she's struck by how comfortable she is here, how relaxed she feels sitting at the kitchen table with her teammates, eating Clint's disgustingly American version of pancakes, and laughing over their shared experiences. It's not always like this; they'd have started arguing by now on a typical day, but today feels different, calmer, like they haven't got anywhere to be or anything to do. It's kind of nice.

Tony and Bruce are the first to head off, neck deep in a conversation that no one else has the expertise or inclination to follow, though everybody has enough experience with Tony and Bruce to know that they won't see hide or hair of them for the foreseeable future.

Steve wanders away not long after, citing an urge to take his sketchbook to the park. Natasha has seen his work, has even been the subject of some of it, and she hopes that she'll eventually get a peek at whatever he comes up with today.

Thor is the last to go, a call from "his Jane" tearing him away from the common area when nothing else could. She'll never tell him, but she finds it kind of sweet that the big guy has such a tiny girlfriend. And for all that he gives off the dumb jock vibe, Thor is nobody's fool, and he definitely keeps up with his physicist on the rare occasion that they're in the same hemisphere.

And then they're alone again, she and Clint, just the two of them seated across from each other at the table. Her cramps have been getting progressively worse over the past hour, and she'd been studiously ignoring them with the others around, but now that it's just Clint, she lets herself wince as the pain reasserts itself.

"That bad?" he asks as she pitches forward slowly. She nods without raising her head from where it comes to rest on the table. She hears him slide his chair back to stand up, and he touches the back of her head lightly when he passes behind her. "Give me a minute to clean up, okay? Then we can head back to your room."

It sounds good right now, really good, and she hopes like hell that he's being serious because she wants to be in bed with him right now, wants him to hold her while she falls asleep so she doesn't have to be awake for these infernal cramps and the accompanying aches and pains.

Okay, so maybe a healthy portion of the latter was caused by being thrown a few hundred feet through the air by a super-villain that liked to call himself Pestilence on the basis of the fact that he could summon maggots seemingly out of thin air. Whatever. Her intestines still feel like they're turning themselves inside out.

Clint is quick about cleaning up, the clatter telling her that he's putting the dirty plates in the dishwasher and the pan in the sink. She hears him scrub the griddle, can tell when he's drying his hands from the sound of skin rubbing against a towel, and then his hands are on her shoulders.

He leans down over her, presses a kiss to the top of her head. "Come on, sweetheart."

"Don't call me sweetheart," she says, but the effect is kind of lost since her mouth is pressed against the table and it swallows up most of her voice. Clint just laughs and tugs her to her feet, letting her twine her arm through his and lean heavily on him as they walk toward her room.

The short trip takes hours in her mind as she tries valiantly not to walk hunched over, and when they finally reach their destination, she makes a beeline for her bed, sinking down with a sigh. After he locks the door, Clint comes to sit beside her. They're silent for a long minute.

"So, uh, orgasms are supposed to relieve menstrual cramps," he says out of nowhere, breaking the silence with his non sequitur. "You know, if you were interested in that sort of thing."

"Wait, what?" she says, looking at him in disbelief. She shakes her head. "My . . . um, flow is actually kind of a bit heavy for that right now, so . . ." She trails off, not sure what he's offering. Sure, they've had sex before while she was on her period, but she's always assumed that the incidents were one offs and that he wouldn't have wanted to if he'd known she was bleeding at the outset.

But they've been different, closer lately, ever since they joined a team filled with gods and supermen, so maybe this is part of them being different, too. Still, she hedges, not quite trusting herself with all the emotions coursing through her at this moment.

"It'd just be messy, and . . ." she says, giving him an out she doesn't really want him to take.

Clint's raised eyebrow stops her cold.

"I wouldn't have offered if I minded that," he says, then rakes his gaze down her body. "Besides, I kind of . . . um," he stammers, turning pink around the tips of his ears.

She bites her bottom lip to keep from smiling too hard. "You kind of what?" she asks, even though she's pretty sure she's figured it out. Nothing makes her feel better quite like embarrassing her normally unflappable partner.

He looks up at her, throwing back her patented eyebrow raise so perfectly it's like looking into a Clint Barton shaped mirror. "You know exactly what," he says, the pink darkening and spreading along his cheeks.

"Yeah, but it makes me feel good when you say it," she tells him honestly, resting her hand on his forearm.

He covers her hand with his, turning it over and bringing her palm to his lips. "I love fucking you when you're like this," he begins, muttering against her palm. The ache behind her stomach has a flutter to it now, and she feels arousal quicken in her belly as he gives voice to his desires.

"Your skin is more sensitive," he murmurs next to her ear, and she sighs breathily. His hands begin to wander, skimming over her breasts, and she can hear the grin in his voice when she presses against him.

"And you practically come apart when I touch you," he says, then pulls the neck of her t-shirt down to kiss her neck. She shudders, and her hands fly to his shoulders of their own accord.

He lathes his tongue along the hollow of her throat and whispers, "You taste different. Sweeter." He pulls her shirt up over her head, casting it aside in one long motion, then leans back in to kiss her sternum, and she's having a hard time breathing.

"You're softer, too," he says and rubs the tip of his nose across the swell of her breasts. He skims his hands up her sides and grins at her shiver. Already tiring of the teasing, she reaches behind her back to unhook her bra, dropping it to the floor and feeling strangely gratified when Clint doesn't even bother to disguise his interest in her newly bared flesh. She crawls into his lap then, straddling him and shifting her hips back and forth teasingly.

"Eager much?" he asks, laughingly, but he's enjoying this as much as she is judging from the way he thrusts up against her.

She knows he isn't expecting an answer, and that's why she says, "Always eager for you."

He growls hungrily at that, flipping her onto her back and pinning her down with the weight of his leg. She could take control still; there isn't anything he could do to stop her if she put her mind to it, but she likes this, likes letting him take over, likes letting him steer.

She can feel his cock rubbing up against the side of her leg, pressing insistently as he runs his warm palm over her stomach, and she can't help the little sigh that works its way out of her throat. His lips start to wander as he presses her down into the mattress, wending his way down her neck and over her shoulders, finally coming to her breasts.

He cups her gently before he brings his mouth down, squeezing with boyish glee that has his pupils dilating and his breath coming faster. His mouth gravitates toward the sensitive flesh, sucking one tip between his lips and swirling his tongue around the peak. She arches up against him at the sensation, and she feels a different sort of wetness pool between her legs in response.

He releases her nipple with a pop, then hungrily attacks the other, biting lightly this time, and she hovers on the edge between pleasure and pain, relishing the way Clint instinctively balances the sensations.

She squirms against him, trying to get a leg under him, wanting to feel his hardness against her center, but she can't quite manage it, can't get enough purchase to move him from this angle, and she sighs her frustration.

He stops sucking on her, presses a kiss over her heart, and then he smoothes his hand across her forehead. "Relax, sweetheart," he says, but that's easier said than done. Her skin feels like it's on fire and her cramps are redoubling their efforts to make themselves known, and god, she needs to come already. Frowning, she makes a noise that sounds disturbingly like pleading, and she'd be embarrassed except this is Clint and he's already seen her at her absolute worst, seen her broken and bleeding and full of doubt.

So she lets go, lift her hips and lets him tug her pants off, pulling her underwear with it, and she's naked and panting in front of him, intrigued by the glint in his eyes. He kisses her low on her belly, just underneath her navel and for a moment she's conflicted, doesn't know how she feels about him continuing his downward path, but then he moves back up her body, dragging his body against hers and sliding his fingers against her mound.

She sighs into his mouth when he kisses her, grinding against his hand while he swirls aimless patterns on her clit.

"Please . . ." she breathes as his mouth wanders again, not knowing exactly what she's asking for, but that's okay because Clint moves back down to nip at her breasts and her brain shorts out. She's so far gone that she doesn't quite realize that he's removed her tampon until she hears the telltale rustle of plastic as it lands in the garbage can by her bed.

He slides his fingers into her without hesitation, and she thinks that she's never wanted him as much as she wants him right now. She grinds against him and moans throatily, acutely turned on by the way he doesn't shy away from touching her, from using his hands on her when she's bleeding. She looks down her body, can see the redness staining his hand as he pumps, and she starts to clench around him.

"Come for me," he says, and she feels herself climbing toward release, her insides twisting up, but this time it's a pleasant feeling, not the uncomfortable ache that's hounded her all day. He uses the heel of his palm to rub against her clit even as he thrusts his fingers in and out of her, and when he blows across one saliva-moistened nipple, the strange sensation tips her over the edge, and she grabs his wrist, grips it tight as she comes around his fingers.

"You're so fucking gorgeous when you come," he says raspily, and she reaches down to return the favor, sliding her hand inside of his pants and rubbing her fingers across the damp tip of his cock. He bucks against her a little wildly, moaning. "Shit," he curses, dragging the syllable out as she wraps her hand around him.

When his eyes slide back into his head, she shifts her weight and rolls them, comes to rest on top of him, and she smacks the side of one well-muscled thigh. "Lift up," she says, then tugs his pants over the swell of his ass, his cock bobbing enticingly when she frees him.

They're both past ready for the main event, so she doesn't bother to waste any more time, just straddles his hips, positioning him at her entrance and sliding slowly down onto him.

"God, that's good," he moans, his fingers biting into the fleshy part of her hips as he seats himself firmly inside her. "You're so fucking slick."

She grins down at him, and there's something unexpectedly hot about seeing him lose control underneath her even as his holds onto her hips with fingers stained with her blood. She's seen her blood on him before, seen his on her, too, but this is a different sort of blood, not the kind from wounds inflicted in battle, but a wholly more intimate kind. She gets the feeling that this moment is going to stick with her for a long while, as this is one of those experiences that she's only shared with him, can't imagine sharing with anyone else.

She starts to feel the familiar tightening low in her abdomen again as she moves on top of him, and his hands are everywhere, all over her, squeezing and pinching and caressing, and she's right back on the precipice of orgasm when she feels him start to erupt beneath her. She slides her hand down, flicks her fingers quickly across her clit, and then just as he clenches up and muffles a shout into his pillow, she's right there with him, coming hard and fast, wave after wave of pleasure filling her body up and leaving her boneless on top of him.

The fog in her brain doesn't lift or she would realize that she needs to get off him and clean up, so it's Clint who manages to gain control of his body first, carefully sliding out of bed and pulling her up to her feet and half-carrying her into the bathroom.

He turns on the water in the shower, testing the temperature before guiding her inside. She's feeling pleasantly adrift as he runs a washcloth over her body, paying close attention to her legs and the junction of her thighs, and she balances herself on his shoulders.

He shuts the water off eventually, wraps her up in towel and dries her off, then hands her a tampon and waits while she puts it in. Even though she doesn't need to, she leans against him as they walk back out into the bedroom, and she lets him tuck her under the covers and pull her flush against him when he slides in next to her.

She knows there are things she should be doing right now, reports she should be filing, and guns she should be cleaning. Instead, she's drifting off, can already feel her brain turning out the lights, and though she might not feel particularly good, her cramps are no longer so insistent and she feels warm, safe, and cherished.

They'll wake up later, stumble out to the kitchen to cook again, or maybe they'll find the team already there, bickering over movie choices and they'll order half a dozen pizzas instead. Somewhere in between dinner and passing out on the couch, he'll tease her about the length of her hair and she'll make a crack about Americans, and they'll laugh while they forget about yesterday and tomorrow and everything that isn't the present moment.

But here and now, they're going to sleep, and as she nestles her face in the crook of his arm, she inhales deeply, breathes him in, and feels herself unwind.

* * *

_Feedback is always loved!_


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